10.24.2011

Monster Monday & A Guest Post

Passing the reins over to the lovely miss Laurie today. After she graciously featured me in her interview series last week, she then put together this guest post, all while completing midterms and personal projects galore. The girl is a champion.

Read on, friends!

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Hello! This is Laurie S. from Flight of the Tumblebee. Claire has graciously allowed me a small amount of air time upon her lovely blog. Thus, I will take some time to introduce myself to her equally lovely readers and tell you all a bit about what I do. Flight of the Tumblebee was initially started as a blog to keep a record of my creative output and to keep in touch with my family while I was abroad in Ireland. Mainly, I penned vaguely humorous records of my European adventures. Such shenanigans involved (among other things) delicious scones with clotted cream, a decided lack of postal codes, and my virginal consumption of haggis. However, during my stint on the Emerald Isle, I stumbled upon something possibly even more magnificent than a fresh-baked scone: my long-lost pal, drawing.

I've drawn my whole life—ever since I could hold a writing implement, in fact. As a child, I filled notebooks to the brim with stories in pictures. Throughout elementary school, I defaced textbooks with doodles and whiled away boring lectures sketching in the margins on my notes. High school was spent either hunched over a sketchbook in math class, dashing off dry-erase doodles in French class, or brandishing a paintbrush in art class. In college, I took a few art classes.

Then, in my twenty-third year, I inexplicably stopped.

For the first time in my life, I stopped systematically creating. I had other things going on, and art suddenly seemed superfluous. Life went by like lightning. One minute, I worked a minimum wage job at a coffee shop. The next, I was in France teaching English. Moments later, I started graduate school. Bits of chalk, pencils and pens only produced fleeting, hopeful sparks of creative energy. Sketchbooks given to me as gifts sat dormant in the corner, blank and unused.

But, this past year, going to Ireland for the summer energized me in a way that nothing else could. One day, I grabbed a box of Crayola markers for five Euros and managed to fill a 40 page sketchbook in the month of July. Then, after a brief period of vacillation, I convinced myself (finally) to buy a Wacom tablet so I could learn the wily ways of digital art. After that, I drew everyday. It seemed the more I created, the easier being creative became. Ideas for images, stories, and comics came faster than my hands could move! I wondered to myself, “Where were all these ideas a year ago?!”

That's when I started asking questions about Creativity (with a capital “C”).

These days, my blog is transforming into a resource about the nature of Creativity and how to go about achieving a state of “flow.” I find the subject absolutely fascinating. After studying Creativity for thousands of years, humanity has yet to come up with definitive answers about its nature. This beast is more elusive than Nessie or Bigfoot ever thought about being. What is Creativity? What is Creative Thinking? How does it work? How does one get better at being a Creative Person? Is measurably improving one's Creativity even possible?

I would argue that, yes, improvement is possible! And, given the right tools, improvement is quite probable. The problem? Easily accessible resources for learning how to hone one's creative skill set are scarce indeed for the average adult. Yet, that's exactly what I hope to build in my tiny corner of the blogosphere. Through writing articles about my forays into the realm of Creativity research, I hope to provide my audience with access to techniques for improving creative thought and action. Whether gifted in artistry, music, design, mathematics, engineering, or the sciences, anyone and everyone can benefit from a sharper creative toolkit. And, I hope to help sharpen yours.